


Chain of Zeroes

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Childhood Friends, Gen, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22321525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: How did Jackie Kozinsky end up at St Sebastian's? This unfinished, abandoned story fragment posits that Jackie and Jeremy were childhood friends.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Chain of Zeroes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magician](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magician/gifts).



> The lovely Magician requested a fic via the Moonridge Fan Auction quite a few years ago now, focusing on minor characters, and I took a punt on trying to write one. She was gracious enough to enjoy this in its unfinished state, and in a spirit of completism I'm posting it to AO3.

Built with Neo-Gothic aspirations, St Anne’s on Webster Street ministered to a parish that embraced, sometimes unwillingly, people of all sorts of heritage. The Germans, the Poles, the Irish; if they came to Levingston and the surrounding little dormitory hamlets to work in the mines, then the Catholics among them trooped up the gentle slope to St Anne’s. It was part of a substantial parcel of land gifted to the Catholic Church back in 1873 by the eponymous George Webster, the first of the coal barons to make their money around Levingston.

A piece of Webster's gift, more or less attached to St Anne’s Catholic School, rolled down another gentle slope to Floyd Creek where it was shaded by trees and covered with long grass and was the resort and sanctuary of any young people who could avoid Father Peter Smith’s eye. It was a hot August afternoon when Jeremy Miller and Jackie Kozinsky wandered down to dip their feet and share a tootsie roll. Jeremy was Father Smith’s favourite, and both boys were relying on Jeremy’s bedrock knowledge of catechism and his genuine piety to avert Father Smith’s wrath.

Floyd Creek was dappled amber brown under the shady trees, and both boys found a spot and draped their legs over the stream edge to dangle their feet while they lay back in the grass, feeling daring because you never knew, they might choke on their candy and die.

“Do you think they’d find us if we never came back?” Jackie asked, like the back field of St Anne’s was Timbuktu.

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “Probably. Your dad would dig the whole town over till he found you. And my parents would probably help him.” 

Jackie shrugged, because your parents going out and finding you was the way of the world, but to die and rot away to a skeleton with grass growing through your ribs had the glow of glamour.

“Did you know,” he said, “that they say there’s the biggest catfish you ever did see five miles downstream from here. What do you think would happen if it swam upstream?”

“It would find us and eat our feet, I guess.” Jeremy sucked on his tootsie roll piece, unconcerned by this dread fate. “But it won’t because that story of the giant catfish is a big old pile of horse hockey.” He sat up suddenly, alert, his eyes looking up the slope towards the church. “You hear that?”

“What?” Jackie asked, savouring the sweetness of his candy. But he listened to the world around them rather than the chatter of the stream and the familiar voice of his friend and thought he heard shouts; boyish voices hitting the change between child and man, a whoop. They seemed to come from inside the church.

Jeremy’s face flushed, and he rose to his feet. “I bet it’s that yellow belly Johnny Irwin and his buddies. Father Pete saw them off a couple of days ago, and they were cursing a blue streak and saying that they’d show him. And he visits on a Thursday afternoon, and Father Mahoney is still over in Roseville.”

“So, let’s go find Father Pete,” Jackie suggested, in no hurry for a confrontation with Johnny Irwin, who was rising fourteen, well built and close to a grown man in both his own estimation and Jackie’s. “He’s probably at my place – you know that he usually calls in on Granma last.”

“But they could do anything. They might break the windows.” Jeremy’s face twisted in distress. “They might tear Father Pete’s vestments or steal the Eucharist.”

Jackie thought Johnny Irwin would be more likely to take a crap in the vestry, but telling Jeremy that would only upset him more and make him more determined to intervene. 

“So let’s go get Father Pete,” he said.

“No. I gotta stop them.” Jeremy began to run up the slope towards the church, with Jackie hot on his heels.

“You can’t stop them. Johnny Irwin makes two of you, and if he has his pals as well...”

Jeremy’s face was red with exertion and anger. “I gotta try, Jackie, I gotta. It’s not right.”

Jackie trailed behind, scared enough to want to throw up, because Johnny Irwin would pound Jeremy into dust.

Jeremy burst through the doors, leaving them open in his hurry. There was Johnny Irwin, and Ed Fielding and Don Baumann. Jackie hovered in the porch, watching through the door. The big boys were climbing over the tops of pews, stepping from edge to edge like a balancing act at the circus. When Jeremy came in, Don stayed where he was, legs astride the space between the pews, his arms out like a tightrope walker’s. Johnny and Ed jumped down, startled and scared until they saw who it was.

“You stop that, or you’ll go to hell.” Jeremy believed, believed with all his heart, but he looked very small compared to Johnny, who sauntered over to stand over him with his hands on his hips.

“Father Shit, you’ve shrunk. What happened, did Mrs O’Hagan put you through the wash with your dog collar?” The other boys laughed, their voices raucous and echoing in the wooden vault of the church.

Jeremy tilted his head up. If he was scared he showed no sign of it and he stared at Johnny, a very small avenging angel.

“Swearing in God’s house means you’ll go to hell. You should go away.”

Johnny worked a big gob of saliva up in his mouth and spat it on the floor.

“What if I don’t want to go away? What are you going to do about it?”

Jeremy’s resource was at a standstill, but not his rage. He balled up his small fists, and Johnny hooted.

“Ooooh. Someone wants to be a martyr.” He sing-songed martyr. “Look, guys, someone wants to be a martyr.” Again, that long, mocking emphasis on martyr.

“Hit him, Johnny.” That was Ed, and then Don joined him. “Hit him, hit him, hit him.”

Jackie bolted out the porch door into the bright sun, blinding after the holy dimness of the church, and looked around desperately for help. Old Mrs Fischer was working in her front yard, and Jackie dashed over to her. “Mrs Fischer, Mrs Fischer, help! Help!”

“Slow down,” she commanded. “What is it?”

Jackie could only point agonisedly at St Anne’s. Everyone knew that Mrs Fischer went to the Episcopal Church. What if she didn’t care about St Anne’s? But her weathered face grew stern, and she picked up her garden spade. “You show me,” she commanded, and followed Jackie, up the paved path past the roses that Jeremy’s father took care of for the church, through the porch doors and into the church itself. Jeremy was curved into a ball, and Johnny was just whaling on him while Don and Ed cheered him on.

Mrs Fischer was a more frightening angel than Jeremy. She brandished her spade and bellowed, a trumpet sounding. “You leave that child alone and clear this house of God. Out you go, trash! Out!”

Don, Ed and Johnny leapt up as if Mrs Fischer was a lion. She stepped aside, and swung her spade like a slugger at Johnny’s backside as he followed his friends in their charge out the door. He stumbled but kept his feet, and they were gone.

Jackie ran to his friend. “Jeremy! Are you okay, buddy? Talk to me.”

Jeremy sat up from the polished floor. “Can’t talk to you if you don’t give me a chance, moron.” His voice was muffled and nasal from the blood streaming from his nose.

“Well now, you’re a sight, young man. Although it’s no more than you deserve brawling in a church.”

Jeremy’s face grew red. He hadn’t looked like he was about to cry before, but he did now.

Jackie’s chest grew hot. Wasn’t that just like a grown up? But then Mrs Fischer went to the Episcopal church; she wouldn’t know about Jeremy, but she was supposed to a be a little deaf, not blind. How come she couldn’t see that Jeremy was littler than Johnny? “He wasn’t brawling, Mrs Fischer, honest. He heard those boys making trouble in the church and he wanted to stop them. Honest.”

Mrs Fischer stared at him, right through him it seemed. “So you say, Jacobus Kozinsky,” –Jackie winced, because everyone always giggled at his proper given name- “so you say.” But her face was less wrathful, and she helped Jeremy up from the floor. “I have some raspberry cordial in my kitchen. And some rags in my wash-house. You can’t go home with that mess all over your face.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jeremy said. “Thank you.”

So that was that, aside from the shouted argument that Mr Miller had with Johnny’s father. Mr Irwin was proud that his son was a bully, and Jackie knew that, and when he heard Mr Miller complaining about that no good bum Irwin he sneaked around to the Irwin house and hid a couple of dead frogs under the seat of the old jalopy that the Irwins drove. So proud of their car. That would show them.

Father Smith had some pretty stern words to say about showing proper respect for God’s house, but at the end of the next school year Jeremy got a little holy medal for ‘special devotion to the mother of Our Lady’. Jackie won the mathematics prize, like he always did.

~*~

Jeremy was the chief altar boy at the Midnight Mass of 1953, carrying the great silver and gold processional cross ahead of Father Mahoney (Fr Smith had been transferred to a Cleveland parish). Jackie stood next to his grandmother while his feet and his fingers froze, and his grandmother wrapped her arthritically crooked fingers around a little spirit-fueled hand-warmer. She had to sit sometimes, rather than kneel, and it humiliated her but that humiliation wasn’t as bad as the time she got stuck, so sitting it was. Her voice quavered in the hymns. It was partly age, and it was partly because there was only her grandson beside her and not her son. Joseph Kozinsky had died of lung cancer five weeks ago, and it was only Jackie’s respect for the old lady that permitted him to step over the door of St Anne’s tonight.

What use was God, Jackie thought. What use was he at all? How could Jeremy stand and kneel in the sanctuary, sing the sonorous Latin responses, when God was no damn use at all. It was all right for Jeremy’s family. Jeremy’s father had a clean job in a clean business that made them good money. Jackie was prepared to bet that Mr Miller wouldn’t die propped nearly upright in his bed because it was so terrifyingly impossible to breathe while lying down. Neither would Jackie die that way. If he'd had any use for God this night, he’d have promised it, prayed for that death that wasn't his father's.

After mass, he waited outside for Jeremy. Even in the bitter cold, a surprising number of men and women still chatted and exchanged Christmas greetings, or waited for their altar server sons and brothers. Jeremy came down the aisle, bundled into his jacket already, his heavy knitted cap held in his hand until he reached the porch.

Jeremy stopped, and frowned at what he saw in Jackie’s face. “Not much of a Christmas this year, I guess,” he said.

“No, not much.”

Jeremy dug into a pocket and brought out some folded paper which he proffered to Jackie. “Here. I cut it out of my Dad’s Life magazine. Merry Christmas anyway.”

Jackie unfolded the paper. It was an interview with the director of “From Here To Eternity.” He’d seen it twice at the movie theater, unwillingly fascinated by the story. Tears burned in his eyes, but he wasn’t going to let them fall. “Thanks. Thanks, Jeremy.”

“You’re welcome. But put it away, because I’m going to ask Dad to give you and your grandma a lift back home, and I don’t want to start Christmas Day with an argument.”

~*~  
The sheer number of zeroes he ‘redirected’ started to weigh on Jackie. It didn’t in the beginning – it wasn’t like he was taking the money for his own use. The vague sense of threat was gone now; he was Pete’s good old boy (his tame accountant), his reliable drinking buddy. Then Jackie got one of Jeremy’s letters. It was short, because what can happen in a monastery besides little day to day mundanities? Jeremy was calling himself Jeremy again instead of Brother Bosco (the wheels of Vatican 2 grind slowly but exceedingly fine he wrote Jackie, and Jackie could see Jeremy’s lop-sided grin as he penned the sentence.) Jeremy was helping the abbot with the monastery administration (“even if I wasn’t as good at figures as you”) and Jackie was suddenly sick at the thought of drinking a beer with Good Old Pete.

He took a walk, and found himself outside St Paul's, gazing up the long terraces of steps to the great double doors. He walked up the stairs and inside, into the hush and incense scented dimness. You don’t forget the things you were taught when you were young, and Jackie made his genuflection and sign of the cross before sliding into a pew. He didn’t pray; he hadn’t prayed since he was a boy and he saw no point in starting now, but he sat while the hush enveloped him and imagined going drinking and talking with Jeremy. He’d choose one of the high class bars, and he’d insist on Jeremy wearing street clothes. He’d still look like an off-duty monk, because knowing Jeremy it would be black slacks and a white button down shirt. They could talk… and there the fantasy stalled because sooner or later they would stop reminiscing or talking about books or current events (Jeremy got to watch the news once a week. It was a great luxury). Jeremy would ask him about his day to day life, what he did, who he knew, and Jackie’s jaw clenched.

He felt as if he was being watched, and he stared up at the suffering Christ above the altar. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said, nothing more than movement of his lips. But despite this irreverence, he knelt and made his sign of the cross properly before he left.  
***

All those zeroes – he imagined them a chain, whipped across his back. All those zeroes, and he knew that his grandmother would weep, and that Jeremy would probably punch him on the jaw.


End file.
